A Christmas Carol review, Culture Whisper
Screenwriter Steven Knight has had a weird whirlwind of a year. He kicked off 2019 terribly with the star-studded stinker Serenity, re-impressed with one of Peaky Blinders’ best seasons yet, and confused everybody with the post-apocalyptic Apple TV+ drama See. Despite not always scoring, there’s an exciting unpredictability to his work.
And, initially, his adapting A Christmas Carol feels like another strange swerve. It’s almost worth asking: why bother?
But within a few minutes of the first episode, we’re glad he did. Knight and director Neil Murphy (Save Me) returns Dickens’s most famous story to the thick, black soot of industrial London, a time the author consistently condemned. This Christmas Carol possesses all the polluted colours of Peaky Blinders, maybe even darker, and wallows in the horrors of the 1840s.
